Executive Summary

Women in Politics

Despite Kerala being one of the most empowering state for women, one thing we severely lack is the active participation of women in politics. We want to encourage women in Kerala to take an active part in the decision making of this state because it is crucial to good governance. To grow as a nation, India has to bring its women to the forefront of politics and we work to make that happen. Women continue to have limited exercise of legislative, executive and administrative powers. They are under-represented in decision-making bodies, there is a lack of women’s issues in the country’s policies, lack of political leadership capacity development opportunities for women, a lack of training possibilities for women to strengthen their leadership capacity, and a lack of financing.

Under Project Women In Politics is a forum wherein we promote women who are trying to enter politics and we write extensively about their contributions and social work and why they deserve to be in the leadership arena. Local women leaders need support and assistance from women’s NGOs, such as ours. We will assist in development of women-leaders, their vision, networks, knowledge and skills in dealing with gender issues and for good governance.

We strive to actively promote gender equality through public policy research and mobilization of other NGO’s to support women candidates. We also plan to collect such women who show promise, drive and leadership qualities, and hiretrainers to train them in the most significant areas of politics. Over the course of 4 years, we will take 30 such women and give them the aforementioned training. This will be called our Joint Women’s Platform.

We will also hold conferences that will spread awareness about our programme and highlightthe necessity of political participation of women in India, extend these programmes to schools and colleges and make use of social media to have far reaching impact. We will also write articles for the mass media such as newspaper on the given topic.

We need to overcome the patriarchy that has plagued our society for so long and ensure women’s participation in politics is something that is given due consideration and attention so we have able, sound, and dynamic women leaders.